Recently a member of More of Me to Love discussed how confidence can have an amazing impact on the way people react to your size. Weight comments abound from friends, family and strangers and you better believe they find people of all sizes.

Of course thin people rarely if ever experience real size discrimination, but the line is blurry where discrimination begins. What if a Mom likes the thinner daughter more, while making the slightly heavier daughter feel inadequate. Is that discrimination?

I often feel sad when boyfriends and sometimes even the parents of my thin friends tell them they need to lose weight, pointing out a particular area of their body that they need to change. With a boyfriend, I would just say dump the ungrateful lad, but with parents it is a bit trickier. This is something I struggle with continually.

How do we (or whoever agrees with me) make parents understand that they are not bad parents if their child likes to eat and does not look like a stick? How do we convey that they may cause far more harm (and lasting body image issues) if they don’t allow the child to eat intuitively and try to obsessively control what and how much they eat?

Of course I am not talking about the parent who tries to make his son or daughter eat a real meal before going for dessert or the Mom who tells her kids that veggies are good for them and they should eat some. I am talking about the parent who singles a child out by saying “you have had enough pie, sweetie.”

I would be very interested in hearing your opinion about these thoughts.